Jeremy Thrane (12 page)

“What’s going on with Liam?”

“Just the usual mind games and hostilities. Nothing really.”

“That’s my call waiting. Can I call you back later?”

“No, I’m going to try to sleep. You have a bed if you need it. And come to my show.”

“Jeremy,” came Max’s voice as soon as I depressed the button and answered his call. “Did I wake you up? I couldn’t wait till later. I just got home. I spent the whole night talking to the most amazing man. Amazing. Amazing. My socks are knocked off.”

“Well, I just got dumped,” I said.

“What?”

I told him.

“I’m stunned,” he said. “It seemed like the perfect setup.”

“For him, or for me?”

“What are you doing tonight?”

“Staying at Amanda’s,” I said.

“Let’s go out to Brighton, we didn’t go once this summer, it’s our last chance. I’m so sorry you’re heartbroken, sweetheart, but I’ll cheer you with food and drink tonight, and incidentally tell you about Fernando, just to take your mind off Ted.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “He’s got a gold cross around his neck, he reeks of Obsession for Men, he spends five hours a day lifting—”

“You might just be surprised for once in your life. Meet me at my place at five, we’ll take a taxi, my treat.”

“No,” I said, “pick me up at Amanda’s. It’s on the way.” I gave him the address.

“You could stay with me, you know, you don’t have to go all the way out to Brooklyn.”

“Amanda offered and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings by saying no, although now that I think of it, she might have just been being sisterly, and now she’s dreading my arrival and wishing she’d never opened her big mouth. I don’t know where I’m going to live, frankly. I also need a job. I have nothing on my résumé, no recommendations, for the past ten years. What the hell am I going to do?”

“For starters, the night is on me. The rest you’ll figure out in due time. Bye for now, time to work. I’ll swing by at around six. Be ready, I’m not going up there and hanging out with those goons. I love you. It’s going to be all right.”

As I bathed, I monitored my vital signs and internal workings, avoided any thoughts that might exacerbate my wounds. I cried for a while like a little kid, sobbing noisily with my mouth wide open, my eyes and nose streaming. It felt good, very cathartic; I could see why my next-door neighbor Dina Sandusky went in for this sort of thing. When I’d finished I blew my nose, dried off, got dressed, made a pot of coffee, and drank it in the armchair by the front windows, looking down at the park. Juanita chirred and bustled in her cage. She knew better than to come anywhere near me right now. No one but a fellow mammal was capable of comforting the heartbroken.

After a while, I saw a scurrying figure dragged along by several four-legged beings that fanned out on their leashes to sniff, pee, bark, and explore, only to be jerked back in line. They pulled their charge along like a dog team with a sled. I could only imagine what invectives and threats he was subjecting them to today; unaccountably, I yearned to be among them, a yelled-at dog on a leash who knew exactly where he stood in no uncertain terms, just one of a gang, his only tasks in life to poop on the sidewalk once or twice a day.

I’d always taken Ted’s public act for a front that masked the passion, sadness, intelligence, and abandon that I alone had been privy to. I’d loved the “real” Ted behind that handsome, charming, impassive wall. How could I not have taken him at face value all these years? After enough time spent tamping down his fires and denying them air, they had gone completely out. He was who he seemed to be through and through. Otherwise, he would have cracked long ago.

This revelation was infuriating and comforting in equal parts, a combination that necessitated immediate action. As I packed a duffel bag with basic necessities, I came across an old paperback collection of the short stories of Paul Bowles. I held the book for a moment thinking of a summer night a long time ago when Ted and I had stayed awake until dawn up here, lying on the rug on pillows, drinking Calvados and eating hard, meaty green olives, listening to Mingus and Monk. I read
aloud a story called “Pages from Cold Point” about a sixteen-year-old boy named Racky who seduced his own father. When I finished, the beautiful, bloodless tale quivered in the air for a moment between us; Ted had looked at me through liquid, sleepy, amorous eyes and said, “Oh, Jeremy, God, you’re the love of my life.” And then I took him in my arms—he was so small compared to me, I cradled him, humming into his hair along with the music. We fell asleep entwined like that on the rug; the sun had nearly risen, the windows were wide open, the warm summer wind blew in. I remembered this perfectly; I hadn’t invented it.

On my way downstairs, I said a silent prayer to Lord Muckety, the closest thing here to a household god, that I wouldn’t see anyone between the stairs and the front door. But on the bottom step sat a kindergarten-sized girl who watched me as I descended.

“Hello, Bret,” I said softly, as if she were a small dog with a reputation for biting.

“How do you know my name? Who are you?” she piped in a stern, sweet voice.

“I’m Jeremy,” I said. “I know your name because your father told me.”

“Do you work here?”

“I used to work here, but now I’m leaving.”

“Oh,” she said, getting up so I could go by. “Does Daddy know?”

“Yes, he does.”

“Did he fire you?” she asked in a tone that implied that Ted fired people all the time.

“Yes, he did,” I said solemnly.

“Daddy!” she shouted suddenly.

“What is it, Peachie?” said Ted, appearing in the dining room doorway in his bathrobe, holding a half-eaten piece of toast. “Where are you going?” he said to me, catching sight of my duffel bag.

“I was invited to stay at my sister’s for a couple of days.”

“He said you fired him,” said Bretagne.

“He was joking with you, sweetie,” said Ted, not missing a beat.

It was interesting to see him playing daddy with this self-possessed little owlet.

She looked at me. “Were you really?”

“I’m sure your father will explain it all to you some day,” I said. “I’ve got to go now.”

“Come on, Peachie, let’s eat breakfast.”

“I already ate my breakfast at seven o’clock,” said Bret, trotting obediently into the dining room.

“Aren’t you going to tell Basia you’re leaving? She’s planning on having you here for lunch.”

“I’ll let her know,” I said briefly, without inflection. Then we looked at each other for a moment, our gazes colliding and glancing off each other. He followed his daughter into the dining room. As I slipped into the kitchen, I murmured bitterly to myself, “Ten Years in Love Nest with Closet Homo Star.”

Basia stood on her footstool before the eight-burner range, scowling at some eggs bubbling in a cast-iron skillet. There was a brown burned-smelling haze in the air.

“Good morning, Basia,” I said.

“I made special dinner last night,” she said gruffly.

“I’m sorry I missed it, Basia. I had a sort of family thing last night, I thought I had told you. Actually, I’m going to stay at my sister’s for a couple of days.” I said it as if my sister lived far away rather than just across the river, and I was rushing to make a train.

The hair on my arms prickled slightly and the currents of air rearranged themselves: Yoshi, gliding silently into the kitchen behind me. “That smells delicious, Basia,” he said, saying “dericious” almost unnoticeably. If he had been Japanese, it would have completely escaped my notice.

“I’ve been wondering something, Yoshi,” I said, enunciating his name extra carefully. “Where are you from in Japan, exactly?”

I noticed that he kept his eyelids at half-mast to make his eyes look as narrow as possible, like a fat man sucking in his gut to look thinner.

“Move,” said Basia brusquely. “No talking in here. Go!”

Yoshi didn’t budge. Neither did I.

“I was born in Osaka,” he said.

“Are your parents Japanese?”

“Why the inquisition?”

“We know so little about each other,” I said with false earnestness. “And we live in the same house.”

“You don’t believe I’m Japanese?”

“I’m expressing interest in your cultural heritage.”

He flared his nostrils a little at this, but instead of telling me to mind my own beeswax, he said with clipped hostility, “My mother is Japanese and my father is Dutch, so I was born Yoshi van Jeetze, a name I always hated, as I’m sure you can imagine. I legally adopted my mother’s maiden name, which happens to be Tanaka, when I turned twenty-one. I grew up in Van Nuys, California, but I’ve traveled to Japan several times. I speak Japanese fluently and my cultural identity is Japanese.”

“So you’re American,” I said mildly.

“Born in Japan,” he said.

“And raised here. You’re a half-Dutch Cali boy. I bet you never ate sushi as a kid.”

“My mother,” he said through clenched teeth, “made it all the time.”

Basia went into the pantry, where she banged some things around to let us know passive-aggressively that she wanted us to bugger off.

“Oh, did she,” I said. “Anyway, whatever. That’s your business. I’m sure it helps in the martial arts world to seem authentically Japanese. I’m sure it did wonders for your credibility on Ted’s movie set. And I’m sure you worked it all you could, because he’s a total sucker for slippery slithery little Asian types.”

“You seem to be sure about a lot of things,” he said in a petulant suburban voice.

“Hey,” I said, “you dropped your accent and suddenly I like you a little more.”

He regarded me coolly, not deigning to respond to this.

“Do you have a black belt in anything?” I asked.

Half his mouth smiled, the other half compressed. He said tightly, “Why would I have been hired as a martial arts consultant on movie sets if I didn’t know anything about martial arts? And now let me ask you something. Do you really think it matters, in the grand scheme of the infinite universe, where I’m from or how I talk?”

“Everything matters,” I said as if I believed it.

We glared at each other like two little school-yard punks.

“Okay,” said Yoshi promptly, “maybe I can tell you this without getting socked in the face, although please remember my black belts in karate and judo. The real reason Ted broke up with you was that I worked the slippery slithery Asian thing for all it was worth, and I threatened to stop sleeping with him unless he stopped sleeping with you.”

Feeling as if he’d just ripped my abdomen open and shoved his fingernails into my spleen, I cradled my fist in my hand speculatively, wondering whether this urge to sock him in the face had arisen solely because he’d planted the idea in my mind.

“I think,” I said in a hoarse voice I did my best to control, “I could have gone quite contentedly to my grave without knowing that, but if you feel better for having told me, well, bully for you.”

“Out of here,” said Basia, swashbuckling back into the kitchen, holding a bowl of onions. “I have patience today with nothing.”

Yoshi, his face bland, his eyes shuttered, slipped through the swinging doors and vanished.

Basia’s eyes glittered at me. “You too,” she said.

“I’m going,” I said. I wanted to smash every dish in the cupboard. There was a set of heirloom porcelain dishes in the hutch, I knew; it would have felt wonderful to fling it piece by piece at Yoshi’s head, or at Ted’s, whirling plates as decapitating disks, cups deadly projectiles, all of it crashing into shards, exploding, bursting apart.

Basia jerked her chin in the direction of the dining room. “That girl,” she muttered.

“What about her?” I asked, puzzled, thinking she meant Bretagne.

“You don’t know,” Basia said harshly, as if she were telling me to wipe the grin off my face or she’d do it for me. “She’s not nice, she’s a very bad girl.” Then she whispered, so fiercely I could smell her breath, which was medicinal and flowery, as if she’d recently taken a nip of violet water, “I was star once. I know what happens when you are star. You care for no one but yourself. It makes you very bad person. He will be sorry he married her.”

What a skein of romantic yearnings Ted had spun here in the Heartbreak Hotel. “I agree,” I said fervently. “He’ll be very sorry, very soon.”

“I try to warn him. He doesn’t talk to me so much with her here. You have to tell him, as his good friend.”

“Believe me, I tried,” I said mordantly. “As his good friend.”

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t want to talk about it.”

“He didn’t listen to you?”

“Not at all.”

“I’ll spit in her eggs,” said Basia.

I laughed bleakly.

She didn’t smile back, and her mouth worked oddly; I had the feeling she was working up a good loogie, and the minute I left she’d hock it into the pan. Oh well, I thought: not my affair. Nothing I could do to stop her. People did what they had to do.

On my way through the living room I turned and looked through the arched doorway into the dining room. Ted and Bret had been joined by Giselle and a young woman I took to be the nanny. They made a good-looking tableau around one end of the old mahogany table, Ted at the head, his women surrounding him. I waved good-bye, but no one saw me.

I walked along the park and headed down Third Avenue. The day was warm and golden and smelled of dry leaves, but I walked heedlessly along, telling myself that Giselle was more of a dupe in all this than I was: She was married to him, and ignorant of who he really was, while I on the other hand knew everything, and was free.

“
Bon appétit
, Giselle,” I muttered to no one.

“I love global warming,” said Max. We were sitting outside at Cafe-Bar Moscow that evening, wearing sweaters but no coats, although it was mid-October. Since the last time Max and I had come here, the next-door Winter Garden had been appended to the whole operation, a step up, I supposed, but cheesy Slavic synthesizer-pop still blared from the speakers, there were still Beck’s umbrellas overhead, their poles entwined with fake lilies, white fuchsia, and daisies. Lamb testicles “Farberge” and hickory-smoked eel were still featured on the menu. The only changes that I could see were that the floor was covered with Astroturf, the tables draped in teal, goldenrod, and peach linen.